Prince and the Evolution Part 3

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The game hero's lead animator and creative director weigh-in.

By Aaron Boulding

Old and new are coming together this fall with the upcoming release of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time as the popular franchise updates early 90s gameplay with fancy 00s technology on the Xbox, GameCube, PS2 and PC. In this case the developers at Ubi Soft Montreal aren't just taking the 2D sidescrolling fun of the original Prince of Persia games and re-applying it to a 3D world because we saw too much of that on N64 and PlayStation. Everybody says they're introducing a beloved franchise to a whole new audience whenever a publisher drags out a retired videogame/movie/television license. With what we've seen of Sands of Time so far, today's audience may have to do some catching up to get all the way down with what the prince is bringing.

Today we do a double play with prince's Creative Director and Artistic Director of Animation, Patrice Desilets and Alex Drouin, respectively. While they probably won't admit it, these two are like the Morris Day and Jerome Benton of the development team. Like the two lovable antagonists from Purple Rain these two really do help the prince look his best.

IGN: The fluid combat moves are going to be the game's strong points. How many different moves can the prince pull off?

Patrice Desilets:

There are two different types of moves: the ones you control directly and ask for and the ones that are the same action but with different animations depending on where you are in the fight. So the action you ask for is like your basic skill of slashing your sword. How it works is you just slash, slash, slash and the enemy becomes stunned and you've got to throw them on the floor and retrieve the sand with your dagger. Those are basic skills. And then depending on where you are in the fight you'll have different moves if you're near the enemy or far from it and those you don't really control. You can if you're really really good and you can say "if I'm that far from the enemy and he's on my right, I know I'll get this particular animation." Sometimes you won't be able to judge when you're right on the border line.

It's like playing a sport basically. You know where you are in this 3D environment and you say "If I'm playing basketball and I'm that far away from the basket I can try to dunk and do this or do that" and it's the same thing in the fighting sequences. But the basics are always the same, it's always slash and retrieve. Then there are special moves in those fights. With that dagger you can freeze an enemy in time. When they're on the ground and trying to fight you, if you've got enough sand, you just freeze them and then they're in another time dimension. You can continue fighting other enemies on the side and then go back and slash them in half to finish them. You won't retrieve the sand from them if you do this, but it'll much easier to kill them that way. So you can really manage things. If you've got four guys and a really big guy, you can freeze him, take care of the other three that are easier to fight and then finish him with a slice. Or you can let him go on the ground and retrieve him later. So you're really managing the situation. Like I told the team, it's not about dueling where you fight one on one, it's really that the enemy is the four guys around you. That's your enemy when you're fighting and you have to manage that. So it's like there's somebody at my back, he's about to slash me, I block him. The one on my left, I attack him and you really just manage the fight like that.

IGN: So you can throw blocks the same way you throw an attacking move by aiming and hitting a button?

PD:

Yeah, and you can counter attack and counter-retrieve enemies. It's always a direction and hitting a button. It's really quite intuitive because there's nothing on the screen telling you anything. But it's really precise yet open. It's not like you have to be pinpoint on the pixel, but it's where you think you're there and yeah, you're almost 100% sure to hit the guy.

There are three different distances (from your character's location): there's really close, middle and far. And you have your four axis: in front, left, right and behind. And really it's like three circles around you in four directions. And you can always go from one direction in one circle to another. Sometimes a guy can be too far away and you'll miss but you can do it. If there's a guy on your back, on your left and on your right, you can always try something and you'll get an animation.